Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg: Immigration and the knowledge economy

The Washington Post, 4/10/201

Earlier this year I started teaching a class on entrepreneurship at an after-school program in my community. The middle-school students put together business plans, made their products and even got an opportunity to sell them.

One day I asked my students what they thought about going to college. One of my top aspiring entrepreneurs told me he wasn’t sure that he’d be able to go to college because he’s undocumented. His family is from Mexico, and they moved here when he was a baby. Many students in my community are in the same situation; they moved to the United States so early in their lives that they have no memories of living anywhere else.

These students are smart and hardworking, and they should be part of our future

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A ‘like’ for linguistics: Can social media save Mexico’s unwritten languages?

The Christian Science Monitor, 4/1/2013

When Hilaria Cruz chats online in Texas with friends back home in Mexico, she switches effortlessly between two languages: Spanish and her native Chatino. The trick is that, until recently, no formal writing system existed to represent the sounds and tones of eastern Chatino, an indigenous language spoken by 20 small communities in rural southern Oaxaca. Ms. Cruz, a doctoral candidate in linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin, had a hand in creating the alphabet she now uses to post messages on Facebook.

Social media have become a crucial bridge between the academics, activists, and young people who want to preserve the more than 360 variants of indigenous languages alive in Mexico today and the communities who actively use them. Many of these don’t have any formal written system, but a growing number of indigenous young people, computer savvy and sometimes far from home, want to Facebook, tweet, and chat in their native tongue. Both through social media, and perhaps because of it, they’re joining a burgeoning movement to create alphabets and a way to write previously unwritten languages like Chatino.

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Silicon Valley of Mexico: Gateway to possibilities

Global Business Hub, 3/6/2013

Two new partnerships bring a vibrant and growing Mexican tech cluster closer to the already prominent innovation economy in Massachusetts. The goal is to open doors for entrepreneurs and industry leaders on both sides of the border to broaden their potential markets and increase opportunities for collaboration and business.

The World Class Cities Partnership (WCCP) joined newly elected City of Zapopan Mayor Hector Robles for a rare and special signing ceremony during a formal session of the Zapopan City Council. The official document, which inducted Zapopan and the region of Guadalajara (the Silicon Valley of Mexico) into the WCCP network, formalized the partnership between Zapopan (signed by Mayor Robles), university Tec de Monterrey (signed by Director of Innovation & Regional Development, Alfredo Ortíz) and the WCCP (signed by Founder & Executive Director, Mike Lake).

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Mexico: Latin America’s second-largest economy lags in digital accessibility

The Christian Science Monitor, 3/5/2013

Of all the numbers that demonstrate Mexico’s persistent inequality, the digital divide is one of the more surprising. There are fewer than 41 million Internet users in Mexico, a country of more than 112 million people. That’s a connectivity rate of just 36 percent in Latin America’s second-largest economy.

Barely 17 percent have Internet access at home, according to the latest figures of the Americas Barometer, a survey by Vanderbilt University’s Latin American Public Opinion. Although the digital divide – the gap between those who can afford access and those who can’t – has narrowed in recent years, progress has been slow and Mexico still finds itself well below its peers.

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Mexico boasts impressive number of engineering & technology grads – #MexFacts

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Op-ed: How Mexico Got Back in the Game

The New York Times, 2/23/2013

In India, people ask you about China, and, in China, people ask you about India: Which country will become the more dominant economic power in the 21st century? I now have the answer: Mexico.

Impossible, you say? Well, yes, Mexico with only about 110 million people could never rival China or India in total economic clout. But here’s what I’ve learned from this visit to Mexico’s industrial/innovation center in Monterrey. Everything you’ve read about Mexico is true: drug cartels, crime syndicates, government corruption and weak rule of law hobble the nation. But that’s half the story. The reality is that Mexico today is more like a crazy blend of the movies “No Country for Old Men” and “The Social Network.”

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Mexico is now a top producer of engineers, but where are jobs?

The Washington Post, 10/28/2012

In an aggressive bid to move beyond low-wage factory jobs and toward an entrepreneurial economy, Mexico is producing graduates in engineering and technology at rates that challenge its international rivals, including its No. 1 trade partner, the United States.

President Felipe Calderon last month boasted that Mexico graduates 130,000 engineers and technicians a year from universities and specialized high schools, more than Canada, Germany or even Brazil, which has nearly twice the population of Mexico.

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Technology can be harnessed to fight drug cartels in Mexico [opinion]

The Washington Post, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, 7/17/12

The cartels that roam Juarez are savvy. Smugglers wear GPS bracelets so they can be tracked — the same blue dots that help smartphone users get from A to B are blipping along in the service of kingpins and their associates.

We know that technology can be used more potently for good. As more people around the globe become connected, they see, read and hear more. Greater access leads to stronger demands for accountability. We believe the spread of modern devices and access for those most threatened will create a virtual, albeit nascent, counterweight against the world’s worst criminals. Even stubborn governments will one day have to meet their citizens’ rising expectations…

In Juarez, we saw fearful human beings — sources — who need to get their information into the right hands. With our packet-switching mind-set, we realized that there may be a technological workaround to the fear: Sources don’t need to physically turn to corrupt authorities, distant journalists or diffuse nonprofits, and rely on their hope that the possible benefit is worth the risk of exposing themselves.

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Mexican Cartels use Social Networking Sites to find Victims and Recruits [Spanish]

El Universal, 5/30/12

According to the DEA, Mexican cartels use IT technicians  to search social networking sites for potential kidnapping and extortion victims, and to recruit American youths.

Their information states that the Familia Michoacana and Zetas cartels use social networking sites most often.  These two cartels are also responsible for the most rapid kidnappings, extortions and actively recruit young people from the United States to work as spies.

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Editorial: Order to the U.S.-Mexico border

Editorial, Los Angeles Times, 3/26/2009

The Obama administration outlined several Southwest border initiatives Tuesday with two clear goals: to prevent the violence of Mexico’s drug war from spilling over into the United States, and to help President Felipe Calderon crack down on the drug cartels threatening the stability of his country. The plan boosts the number of agents on the border and in Mexico, increases intelligence and technology capabilities and seeks to improve information sharing among local, state and federal law enforcement agencies. These are significant steps — and signs of an evolving understanding that this war is of our making as well as Mexico’s, and that it cannot be won without considerable attention from Washington.

[Homeland Security Secretary] Napolitano called this the “first wave” of things to come, which is heartening. National security is rightfully the administration’s first concern, but it cannot be achieved until a comprehensive plan is conceived and implemented to address the domestic components of this international drug war: the gun laws and money laundering, drug use and drug addiction in the United States.

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